Healthcare Comms with Community Health & Sheppard Pratt

Speaker 1:
Hi everyone. Welcome to the Spotlight on Healthcare. My name’s Chad Hinkle. I am with Firstup. I work with all of our healthcare customers once they become a customer with Firstup. And I’m really excited for the session today because I’ve, I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to work with these folks for about the last six weeks on several different elements of what goes into being a communicator in the healthcare space. And I know that there are challenges that they face that are similar to the folks that are outside healthcare, but we really have, I think, a good mix of the major themes that are going to be important to everybody today. So before we get started, just to give everyone a sense, we’ll particularly these folks, a sense for who’s here today. I’d like to just get an idea who is actually not in healthcare. If I could get a show of hands. We have a couple and so everyone else, healthcare communicators, hands up. Okay, great. Anybody in IT or HR or are we all communicators in here?

Speaker 1:
We got a little, not really sure what job you’re in, getting promoted or something. Okay. And then finally, in terms of everybody’s platform, can we get a sense of, is there anybody who is considering Firstup here? Bianca? Yeah, we haven’t talked. I’ll catch you. Okay. Another, and then secondary, is anybody a customer but in implementation and are trying to think about their launch and what’s to come. Okay. A couple there and then everyone else has launched, recently launched or has been a while. Okay. All good. Great. So without extending this any further, I’m really excited to welcome Erin Kennedy and Jana Brewer from Community Health System, which changed while we were working together. And Tamara Chumley is from Sheppard Pratt and so they’ll do deeper introduction, but really happy to have everybody here today. So thank you.

Speaker 2:
Thank you. I’m Erin. So yeah, we have the most generic hospital system name in the world. I’ve spent the last 16 years in employee communications all at community health system. And when I started I was a one person shop and we were all Outlook all the time, right? And paper flyers on bulletin boards and nurses’ break rooms. But we’ve evolved and we have a four person team and we have a pretty robust usage of the Firstup platform. So I’ll let Jana introduce herself and then we’ll start.

Speaker 3:
I am Jana Brewer. I am also part of the internal communications team at Community Health System. I have been with the organization for eight years. I was part of the original implementation team and then I also am our lead program administrator for the platform. So I’m in the weeds and I know all the ins and outs of everything.

Speaker 2:
So just to give you a quick snapshot of who we are, we’re not going to dwell on it, but we’re a healthcare system. We’ve been around 125 years, 27 years now, and we really, for most of that history, we have just been a hospital system. But a couple years ago we added a health insurance plan that serves local employers and believe it or not, during the pandemic we decided to start a medical foundation and Doctors Group, California is one of five states that is not allowed to have hospitals hire doctors, so they’re not employees, they’re affiliated. So you have to have this sort of separate beast and it is sort of a beast. But now we have 40 practice locations because we’ve been setting up doctors offices like crazy the last two years and in two counties. But we serve a population of 1.7 million in a five county region and we’re primarily in central California.

Speaker 2:
We’re the only level one in trauma and burn center, so we serve a much larger area as you can see with that population and as the safety net provider for our region. We are also the high risk pregnancy and birthing center where the last 10 years have delivered the most micro preemies in all of California. Those are those tiny little miracles that weigh under three pounds. So you can see that that’s why our employees are busy, they’re stressed, and frankly since the pandemic they’re burned out. So as you can see, we did more than our fair share in the pandemic During that time, we also set up the equivalent of a small hospital in surge space. We trained hundreds of employees for new medical care roles and we sent 8% of our employees home permanently to work remotely.

Speaker 2:
The audience that we’re trying to reach now is this one, and you can see primarily we’re focused on our employees, but we also do speak to doctors and nurses as really our core focus. All the mass communications go through our internal team, and that’s four of us right now and we use really Firstup platform for all of it. Our Firstup platform is called Community Emphasis on the Unity because we’re trying to get everyone under one umbrella. Like most of you, our workforce is hard to reach. They’re busy, they’re stressed out, they don’t sit at desks and they work around the clock. Before we started Firstup we had average open rates of about 30 to 35% on email, and that’s because half of our workforce doesn’t even sit at a desk. They don’t sit at a desk and pull up their email. Only 2% of our workforce, and those are mostly our high level leaders or desk workers like Jana and I have a company phone with email preloaded on it. So really hard to get people with email. So when we were looking for a new platform, we knew we had a couple challenges to solve. We wanted to really reach employees where they would see messages. We really wanted to better engage them and we really needed a better way to measure what we were doing. I’m going to hand the click over to Jana

Speaker 3:
Before we dive in and I give you a little bit of an overview of what launching our platform community looked like. I wanted to get just a quick show of hands to see how many of you launched our platforms if you’ve launched your platform during the covid pandemic. Just wanted to get a gauge of how many people might relate to our next story in our launch. So we began our Firstup journey in October of 2019. That’s when we signed our contract. We were planning for a spring launch and the reason being is we were moving from an email only tool. If some of you were curious, we used Popo. So we were moving from an email only tool to an entire communications platform. So it was a drastic difference for our team. So we wanted a little bit longer of a launch for us. So what we didn’t know is that Covid was going to hit our California region in February of 2020 and immediately our launch plans were put on hold. We joined the crisis command center. We were immersed in that world and sending out daily communications from our old email platform and it is like you cannot launch something new right now.

Speaker 3:
But what we didn’t know is so literally maybe a month later leadership and the IT teams came to us and said, Hey, we have a problem. Our COVID communications are not getting to frontline staff soon enough. And the second we were hitting send, as most of you can relate, is literally the policies best practices we’re changing the second we were hitting send. And so we couldn’t reach those frontline care workers because they check emails about every three days or so. And so what happened was also our intranet was and still is not mobile friendly, which also is a huge leverage for us to get people into the app. As Erin shared, nearly half of our workstations are also shared and not very many corporate issued cell phones. So luckily we were pretty far in our preparing to launch our platform, picked things back up. It took us about two weeks.

Speaker 3:
Things were not buttoned up as much as we would’ve loved to, but we did launch our platform the end of March of 2020 at the request of our IT because they were ready to have something mobile friendly. This is our current main audiences, sorry, our primary audiences are three different, I guess buckets you could say. So employees, our vendors, which includes volunteers and travelers as well as our affiliated physicians. As Erin said, they’re not our employees here in California up to this point. So we’ve been launched for about three and a half years. Our pre focus has solely been really on employees because we have control over that audience and that data. We are working with our medical staff office right now to clean up our physician data and the hope is it comes from a different database than HR to start that data sync and start making our community platform the sole communications platform for that audience as well.

Speaker 3:
Right now they used a different email platform. So that’s our focus this next year. Today we’d like to share five success tips for you of how we achieved our high registration numbers that I shared on this last platform or the last slide. The first one is provide users easy access to the platform. Number two is really know your audience data. Number three is meet people where they engage most and really use all of your delivery channels. Number four, create a centralized information hub. So users think of your platform first. So I want people to go, Hey, I know community’s going to have what I need. Number five is it’s not always all about what you need them to see. It’s make it fun too.

Speaker 2:
So on that first tip on easy access, I’m going to tell you what’s key is get single sign on for your Firstup platform. It was really an easy ask for us because we already were using single sign-on for a lot of our third party vendors like Kronos. So it wasn’t a big deal really, it makes it like a seamless experience. There’s no extra passwords to remember. Everyone gets that single sign-on. But what’s also key for us is every computer that’s within our facilities, when you open up a browser, what you get is our intranet homepage. And our intranet homepage has probably a good two thirds of its content is Firstup content from our platform, which we call community. And so it’s very seamless and they click on it, they’re into the Firstup platform and it just automatically takes them in because they’re already signed in.

Speaker 2:
The other one that’s key is really know your data. You can’t get anywhere unless you can build your audience groups and really target. And we’re not the keepers of the data that is your HR folks and your IT folks and you got to work really closely with them. So there are new BFFs. We meet with them very regularly. Our IT partners are amazing. They join us for our client calls with Firstup, and they really get our world knowing that data, being able to speak the same language helps us really target and build audience groups so that we can get messages to people and we really can tell that we’re not spamming our employees. They’re really getting what they want. And it also helps us troubleshoot when we have problems with delivering a message to the right group. I think that’s a key one. Also, meeting people where they engage.

Speaker 2:
When we started Firstup, we know behavior’s hard to change. We didn’t immediately do a huge push for downloading the app. Now because we were in the pandemic, people wanted to download the app, they wanted the information in their hands, and our intranet is not mobile friendly. So we were, and still are doing a lot of email communications. We continue to do that, but the way we get people to engage with the email communications is we’ve really moved away from single subject emails. We use ’em for very key things. We do newsletters, so we do an operational newsletter to leaders and then to employees at the beginning of the week. And then on Thursday at the end of the week, we do a more fun newsletter that’s HR related data. I mean information and fun stuff like events and also recognitions. So they click on a post, they’re back in the Firstup platform and they’re usually stay and they look around.

Speaker 2:
When we feature news in the platform, it gets featured automatically on the front page of our employee intranet, which is called the Forum. And so again, we’re sort of leveraging that. We don’t use push notifications very much because we don’t want people to feel annoyed, but when we do, it works. I mean, we have high rates of engagement with our push notifications. I can tell you for an instance, during the pandemic, our employee health services needed nurses to volunteer to take extra shifts to staff vaccine clinics to get everyone vaccinated because we were one of the first dates to require healthcare workers to get covid vaccines. And when I put a push notification out to only people with registered nurse licenses within an hour we had a hundred volunteers calling employee health services to pick up those extra shifts. So it works. We still use paper on those bulletin boards in break rooms, but what we do now is we put a QR code that’s trackable and when you click on the QR code, it takes you right back into our Firstup community platform. Jana, explain some other key things we’ve done.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, one of the other ways this year was really exciting, kind of the launching more visible shortcuts or quick links. And so we were really excited about this new feature and one way we used it this last year was around hospital week. We made it really easy for users to be able to, that don’t have access to their email on a regular basis to find the information. So all of the activities that we had across all of our campus, we kind of crowded them into one topic and then made that the very first button on our shortcut link, and you can see by the chart here, is that there was a huge, the very first day of hospital week kicked out even though the shortcut link had been there for a week. The first day I was like, Hey, what’s going on? And so you can see by the huge influx of users that visited that quick link.

Speaker 3:
One thing is just remember, it doesn’t have to be evergreen. It can be short-lived and take it off. We do have ones that are evergreen, but again, don’t forget about the content that’s a little short-lived too. Okay, the last tip that I’m excited to share with you guys is kind of some of our strategy tips. So don’t solely focus on what you always need them to see. Make it fun too. And what I mean by that is if you draw your audience in with the fun, once they’re in your platform and your experience, they’ll also see the need to know stuff too and start spending some more time with that emphasis with a big strong emphasis on recognition and connection, which are huge business priorities. For our team, there are three ways we like to entice users to come into our platform. Giveaways, contests, and user content.

Speaker 3:
One of the things that Chad has been promoting to people, so if you’re here and Chad has talked to you about this, it is what we do with our Fresno Grizzlies. So we have a sponsorship with a local AAA affiliate baseball team. We’ve had this sponsorship for years, but we had a big block of tickets that we get and they wanted to use this as an employee perk. So what we started doing is posting these digital ticket links inside our community platform to drive users into the platform to get their tickets. So kind of here’s just a little brief overview of our strategy of how we like to promote these tickets. So a few weeks before the game, we published that ticket link again in community. I deliver it very early morning. I use it web assistant and I also use it through push notifications.

Speaker 3:
So what that does is people that have push notifications turned on, they get first dibs of those tickets and they go super, super fast and they absolutely love that. Now, what we do later in the afternoon is then I push it to our intranet through a micro app, and then I also push it through a newsletter. So no matter what delivery channel is your preferred method, you’re going to get access to those tickets. Some people just get them sooner than others. What we also like to do is if you attend the game, so in those communications we tell users, Hey, post your game tickets hashtag community grizzly span. And what I do is I pull all those hashtags out of the platform and I give all those users access to our next game of tickets early. So that also boosts our user engagement. And people again, see that other folks are at the game and they love it.

Speaker 3:
So again, what we do also promote with push notifications is not everybody, especially in healthcare, they don’t work. There’s day shift, there’s night shift, there’s people that don’t work shifts that day. So we try and make it fair in order to deliver those tickets because they go within usually about 12 hours. One of the other things we do is contests. One of the contests we ran recently, and we actually got to do something we wanted to do back in March of 2020 that we were not allowed to do was we did something called a Be Well Fest. It was basically a resources fair that we did across all of our main hospitals that corralled all of our resources, HR resources, Kronos, all different types of things into one to teach users, Hey, this is what the benefit is for you to have these different apps.

Speaker 3:
We did have a boost space there, and basically we sat there and we taught people, help them download the app if they didn’t have it or if it had offloaded because they hadn’t used it recently. We helped them navigate the platform teased and showed them shortcuts if they were nurses, we showed them our nursing news channel, but we kind of tailored those conversations to those people to show what benefit it was for them to download the app. We also encouraged them to download or turn on push notifications, and of course, we use the grizzly tickets as bait, and it was an easy sell. So now today we are able to reach 10% more employees than we were prior to that May event just by having those communications. One thing I did skip over, so this is a little bingo card, so if you walked around to all the booths, it was a stamp card.

Speaker 3:
So if you filled up this entire stamp card, you were entered into a raffle to win care points. And if any of you guys have Achievers platform, if you know what that is, basically you can cash those points out for gift cards or different kind of prizes and people will do anything for literally $5. So it’s awesome. The last thing is we love to showcase user content. Something we did last Veterans Day, we’re also going to do it. This coming Veterans Day is highlighting our community veterans. What we realized really early on is we really didn’t have great veterans data documented hr. It wasn’t something that they regularly asked. So months ahead of time, we promoted to our veterans, Hey, we really want to recognize you, but we need you to update your status in hr. Created a post, walked them through that easy process.

Speaker 3:
What we did is we doubled the amount of veterans that had self-identified, and we were able to have an accurate list of veterans in order to promote. We had a Grizzlies military appreciation game, and again, I didn’t want to open those tickets to everybody. I knew other people would take them, so I was able to target it just to our veterans and give them and their families tickets. But I also was able to take all of those user submissions, use the micro app and push them to the front of our intranet. And what I did is I also did that the week leading up to Veterans Day. So as people saw posts come in, they’re like, Hey, I’m also a veteran. I didn’t see this earlier. I want to also go post my dad and my military bios. We just asked for simple information, photos, whatever they were comfortable sharing, rank time in the military where they served, things like that. And then we also showcase that information through a newsletter and I think that’s the end. Oh, this was super, super successful. So we also replicated the same strategy for doctor’s day with our doctor’s day communication folks.

Speaker 4:
Oops,

Speaker 2:
Lemme go backwards. So

Speaker 2:
There. So we know what we’re doing actually is having impact. So we don’t just use our Firstup data to look at how many people are opening, how many people are liking and engaging. That’s important, but we’re also partnering with our HR partners to look at the impact of our communications on the actions and the impressions people have from those communications. Our number one business goal in internal communications is retention. I don’t even need to tell you all because all in healthcare why retention is a big deal. It’s expensive to onboard a nurse, and since the pandemic, it’s been a big problem. They could just go down the road for a big signing bonus and they do, and then they come back after a year. But we do a lot of recognition stories, we do a lot of pride building stuff, and we get a lot of employees reading that. And we had the biggest jump on our employee survey that we do every May or June, depending on that one question, feeling appreciated. So it does make a difference.

Speaker 2:
Growth is a big thing. If somebody’s growing their career with us, they’re going to stay with us. We have a lot of tuition, scholarship, tuition reimbursement, scholarships and training opportunities. And in all of those, we require our employees to stay another two years after they graduate if they’ve gotten a scholarship. That’s part of getting a scholarship. We are significantly above healthcare benchmarks on employees feeling like we do give great growth opportunities, and I think we set a record because 91 people not only responded, but they had applications in the first 12 hours after we announced a new nurses training school that we partnered with. So that kind of impact shows our leaders to partner with us to push out their communications. The thing that we haven’t tagged with our initiatives, and that could be a whole other breakout, is initiative tagging is how we’re helping our employees feel very connected to their leaders.

Speaker 2:
But we do measure it on our employee survey. And as you can see, C, we are in a position of strength right now, but we want to do better and we do do a weekly communications to managers. We give ’em top things to share with their teams. We do a monthly resilience playbook newsletter that helps them with tips on how to better recognize their team and support their team’s wellbeing. So the second highest jump on our employee survey that we did this last spring was feeling like their boss cared about their job satisfaction. So I call that a win. So that’s a huge impact. And we’ve gone a little over. I’m going to apologize to my

Speaker 5:
Reenter. Take as much time as you need, promise only plenty of time for questions.

Speaker 5:
Okay. My name is Tamara Chumley. I’m the Senior Director of Strategic and Operational Communications at Sheppard Pratt. I’ve been with Sheppard Pratt for about five and a half years now, overseeing our PR and communications. You’ll probably hear some similar themes between our two stories. So certainly the way we think about internal communications is not necessarily different amongst probably a lot of our organizations in the room, but sometimes we’re coming at it from different places, even if we all launched during a pandemic, which created its own challenges for sure. Just out of curiosity, my community health colleagues here mentioned how long they’ve been around. Sheppard Pratt has actually been around since 1853. We started as a single hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and we’ve been evolving ever since. But I’m just kind of curious how many folks have an organization that’s been around 50 years? A few, a hundred years, few others, more than 125.

Speaker 5:
Okay, couple. So we’re constantly evolving, right? As an organization, we’re kind of having to keep thinking about our strategies as a result of that evolution, and that’s kind of part of our story. So we are the largest private nonprofit provider of mental health, substance use, developmental disability, special education, and social services in the country. So that’s a lot of things that we do. And if we had a mascot, I’d say it probably would be a unicorn because I don’t think there’s necessarily somebody else kind of does all of those things. There’s certainly folks that do each one of those, but not all of them together. So we offer programs and services that really treat the whole person. It might be inpatient, it’s outpatient. We have rehabilitation services, we have housing, we have job training and more. We have more than 380 sites of service across Maryland. Those are hospitals, those are schools. We have residential housing, outpatient clinics and more, and we treat more than 80,000 people annually across all of those.

Speaker 5:
We also employ 5,000 people across our 180 programs in Maryland. And just recently we launched a new consultation management and development services division, where now we’re partnering with hospitals and health systems nationwide to help them expand or in some cases create new their behavioral health services. So this is a new division where now we have actually employees across the country. So that really has kind of changed when we think about our communication needs and how to target all of our employees, like my colleagues here, Sheridan, as many of you are probably in the same boat. Our employees are desk-less. We have folks in the classroom. We have folks that are going out in mobile crisis services. We have people who are out in the community doing our assertive community treatment. We have people that are like our facilities workers and environmental services workers who truly just aren’t on email.

Speaker 5:
They rely on their leaders to cascade information to them. And then we have obviously now more than ever, more remote workers. And covid really did kind of change the dynamic of probably everybody’s workforce, and we truly do have a very diverse workforce given the nature of all the different types of facilities and job roles and functions that our organization is doing. So communicating to all of those folks effectively has been a challenge. Our launch story, I think we probably have all heard that communication can make or break an organization, and probably one of the top workplace issues often is a lack of communication or a lack of effective communication. I would just be curious again, by a show of hands, given your organizations, how many of you think that you’re kind of a disparate organization because of the many different locations you have or the corporate structure or the type of worker that you have?

Speaker 5:
Do folks think that they’re kind of disparate? Okay. Yeah, we are for sure. I’d like to say we were the sum of many parts. So over our very long history, we had a lot of different organizations that we acquired under the Sheppard Pratt umbrella just prior to March, 2020 when we actually did a rebranding and everyone actually came under the Sheppard Pratt brand and we renamed everybody as Sheppard Pratt. We were known by four different corporations in Maryland. That’s confusing, right? That was confusing to external audiences. That was confusing to our employees. People did not feel affiliated with Sheppard Pratt. They aligned with their kind of location. They aligned with their department. They truly didn’t feel the Sheppard Pratt Band because they hadn’t been known as Sheppard Pratt for so long. So that was a challenge that we had to truly help people identify, and that’s really our communication stories.

Speaker 5:
How do we create a strategy that unified our organization that faltered a culture now as one Sheppard Pratt, and that was able to centralize communications because we had those corporate, those four organizations, we were extremely decentralized. Every one of those organizations had their own HR department, had their own IT department, had every department was individualized. So communications were very separate. That made it challenging for us to try to talk to people. Our only real true method of communication was Outlook email. So if anybody else feels like they were living in the dark ages, we were too. Don’t worry. But even that wasn’t effective because all of those organizations were so different. We didn’t have unified distribution lists. We were trying to target people. We couldn’t target people. So we were in some cases talking to the abyss, it felt like, and that made it a challenge. We also knew that not all of our employees were on email. Again, given those different types of roles and functions, we knew that email wasn’t going to be the most effective way to communicate. We also didn’t truly have an intranet system. Each one of those organizations had a place that was maybe a document repository where some information lived, some systems lived. One employee in this location necessarily couldn’t access something over there. So again, we had a lot of communication challenges.

Speaker 5:
When I started at Sheppard Pratt, I had a vision. I really did. I wanted to see this centralized communication come together. This was something that was incredibly important. I knew in order for us to be effective and to truly bring all of our employees together, it did take a pandemic in order for that to happen. But hey, we all start somewhere. So prior to March, 2020, like I mentioned, we were looking at this rebranding effort, and part of that, we did some focus groups where we went out to all of these different locations. We went out to all these different corporations to try to understand what people knew. Did they know Sheppard Pratt? They did not. They didn’t really know Sheppard Pratt. They didn’t know kind of who they were a part of. Again, they might’ve known their location, they might’ve known their department. But what we found out was that we were actually doing a disservice to the people that we served in our communities.

Speaker 5:
We have an incredibly robust system that can touch people at so many different points in their life and their journey. But our own employees weren’t good brand ambassadors because they didn’t know what the actual organization did. So part of what we needed to do was to really educate our own employees on who we are, what we do, so that they could better support their community, they could make those connections to others, and that was a big focus for us. How do we bring that together? How do we develop and implement, which I have here an organization-wide communications platform that access a focal point for internal communications, a starting point to access our internal external resources and truly unified our employees kind of under that Sheppard Pratt name. We wanted to make sure it was employee-centric. We wanted people to have kind of that one-stop shop, to get that information, to get those tools and resources to do their job, but to also feel connected to us, to our mission and to each other. That was a big part of it. We didn’t have that connection happening across the organization.

Speaker 5:
So kind of this need to bring all of us together, we knew occurred out of covid. We had previously been looking at some different platforms prior to 2020, and really that kickoff was, once Covid happened, our leadership agreed that we needed to make a change. We were not able to communicate effectively. Things were happening as Erin and Jana shared so fast, rapid communication, rapid changes, and we didn’t have a way to do that to our people, especially those frontline workers. So with their support, we were able to launch in September, but we started from May, 2020 through the summer to really try to plan for that. What did our communication strategy, how can we make this effective? How can we try to bring everybody together? So just do a quick video. So this truly really was, this was about, again, creating this one location to get people connected, to get information and resources that they really didn’t have access to previously all in one place.

Speaker 5:
Again, we had those disparate organizations that had a lot of different places. They were trying to find their information. So for us, it was about creating something where they could easily go to. We also had both mobile and desktop available for people. Mobile was not really our kind of organization culture either. So that’s something that continues to be a slow adoption, but it really was a way to start getting our people to understand what information was available to them. I want to make sure we leave time for questions, so I’m going to kind of skip through this a little bit faster. I think for us, and what I want to share today, I imagine other people have been in the same shoes that we were in. Just because you build it does not mean that they will come. And we had a lot of challenges.

Speaker 5:
We had a lot of roadblocks, and I’m not shy about saying that. That was something that I didn’t necessarily think was going to be such a problem, because we had those four different organizations and those four different HR and IT systems information didn’t all feed to each other. We were not able to do single sign-on like Erin had mentioned, because we had some IT challenges that we weren’t able to do at the time of launch. We really had a complicated registration process because we found out when we went through this process that we actually had the same employee IDs across different corporations. So that couldn’t be our login. We created new IDs, which let me tell you how that doesn’t actually work when you have to give somebody a new ID and then expect them to remember it if that’s never been an ID that they’ve used before.

Speaker 5:
So these are true challenges. People didn’t know where to get that information. It wasn’t easy for them to do, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t necessarily move forward. You have to have a starting point. You’ve got to start somewhere, and we did, but that didn’t make us pause and reevaluate what’s our plan here? How do we make this truly the effective communication hub that we wanted for our employees? So we took that pause with both our HR and IT partners. We were able to enable S S O. We made Sheppard Prep Pulse the default homepage for all of the employees across the network. So when they logged into their web browsers, it was there including our shared workstations. So again, no matter what nurse went on, somebody could always access. That’s the first thing that they saw. We launched our new H R I S database in spring of 2022. The first two points were done in March and February of 2022. So we finally now had one single data source to pump into our system. We were able to now kind of target our employees like we’ve never been able to before. I’ll talk about more of this in a minute, but we also added those quick links for the top of our systems, and then we were driving everything to Pulse. We are letting people know, this is truly your one-stop shop.

Speaker 5:
With all of those changes, you can see we’ve had a really dramatic increase. Our registrations went from 31% in January, 2022 to 92% as of August, 2023. Our monthly viewership went from 9% in January, 2022 to, sorry, I’m trying to see here. 86% today. So again, we saw a tremendous increase as a result of that. One other thing that we did during this time, when we kind of made some of those other changes we found within our system, because that registration process was so challenging, we had a lot of folks that were stuck in this registering status. They tried once, and because it wasn’t easy, they gave up. They didn’t go back. So we created a drip campaign that we were able to re-target those people who we thought were maybe lost. We found out clearly they weren’t actually lost once we made it easy for them, they did come back.

Speaker 5:
They did re-engage. And then what we also did with that content was really try to reinforce who we were as an organization. We wanted to share again that they had tools and resources here. We wanted to share stories. We shared video with them that explained who Sheppard Pratt was. We highlighted programs so that people started in that initial kind of stage, figuring out who we were and then driving them back to the platform, centralizing our communications. This truly was our main goal. As I said, we were very decentralized. Information was coming at you from all places. When I first started, everybody could send an email pretty much to a distribution list. There were really no kind of parameters in place. We had sometimes three, four emails going out a day to everybody. It became white noise. People stopped paying attention. That’s actually something we heard in a lot of our focus groups.

Speaker 5:
People were like, I don’t read those emails anymore. So those all employee emails got lost. So we were trying to send important critical information from our leadership. People stopped reading it. We had parts of our organization that again, didn’t feel connected to Sheppard Pratt that had previously told us that doesn’t apply to me. Again, they weren’t feeling connected to our organization. By centralizing everything and having this kind of push pull approach within the platform, we were able to actually reduce the number of email communications we send. So now our critical information stuff that’s coming from our leaders is truly going out via that email. Those other things, we’re able to host here. We’re able to let people come in and see that we’ll feature it. We’ll do different things so that it’s still top of mind, but we’re not pushing every message out to people.

Speaker 5:
Again, we have a number of people who are never going to see that in a timely matter anyway. So it’s really more about the timely communications coming to them. We now have 95% of our total users that are registered within our platform. We have within the last three months, 3,600 viewers who are using us via desktop. We have our shortcut link to our H R I S system that had more than 32,000 clicks. So when we first built it, everybody didn’t come. When we made it easier for them, they actually were. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to come, they didn’t know how to get there, but once they came, they were actually able to find information that they needed. Like Jana and Erin share too. Newsletters are a big part of our strategy as well. So we know folks aren’t going to go every single day onto the platform.

Speaker 5:
Again, their jobs aren’t going to allow for that. So we’re aggregating the most important information on a biweekly basis. We’re taking a look at what our top stories are that people who are engaging on the platform are seeing, and then we’re leveraging those back up to everybody. We’re also using this from our leadership strategy standpoint as well, and do a biweekly leadership digest to our leaders to help them cascade important information. Because again, we know we have a population of users that they’re just not checking their email, and they’re also not going to go onto the platform. That’s just really not what they’re going to do, and those are folks that are going to be hard to hit, but we want to arm our leaders with the information so that they can share it back, and we’re giving them, again, those critical pieces and pushing that out to them on a biweekly basis.

Speaker 5:
Creating one Sheppard Pratt. Again, this truly was about unification for a very decentralized organization that was made up of the sum of many parts. Part of our content strategy has really been focused on unifying our organization. We have sometimes throughout the year, we’ll do kind of these little tidbits throughout the week, giving little facts and figures history, and at the end of the week, we’ll do a pop quiz, and for folks who kind of paid attention all week long, they’re then entered to win some swag items. We also did a history with Hess Segment, which is our chief of staff and our longest term employee who’s been there for 52 plus years. The man is a storyteller. He’s got all of the gossip. He knows everything that’s happened throughout the organization, and it was a really fun segment to kind of get people, again, to feel connected, but to do it in a really fun and different way.

Speaker 5:
We also then use that video as part of our new employee orientation, and then that can drive people back to the platform so that as new employees, they see the segment, they come back and get the rest of the information and start to have what they need to do their day-to-day job. I also talked about this kind of idea. What we found out during some of our focus groups is though even these organizations were different, something that came out as a theme was that people felt like family. They said the reason that they stayed at Sheppard Pratt was because it felt like family. We started to uncover that. We had a lot of these connections throughout the health system. We had mothers and daughters, we had sisters, we had husbands and wives who were working in different departments and programs throughout the organization. So we’ve started to spotlight these people and we’re getting tremendous engagement to be able to showcase that.

Speaker 5:
Again, that feeling of family is really about who we are, and people are coming to work and work together because this is such a family feel. So that’s something we’ve been spotlighting a lot of. Our most engaged content is truly around those employee spotlights, those program spotlights. A lot of that is pointing outward and showing people, again, who we are. Something we did during Covid to help again make those connections throughout our organization, was to host virtually through the platform some information sessions about our different programs. This was to help our discharge nurses, some of those other coordinators that we have within our systems better know the organization. So we hosted these sessions where our employees could come and learn from their colleagues what the other parts of the organization were doing to help try to make some of those connections more seamless so that again, our employees were more informed, they could better inform our clients, our patients, our students, their families. And the last thing that we regularly do is truly kind of those appreciation recognition weeks. All of us in healthcare know there’s about a million of them. You can fill an entire content calendar with them. But again, I think it’s an easy way for people to feel connected, to have that culture. You can share that with people, and then others get to comment and post and take a quick thank you out of someone’s day can truly make a difference.

Speaker 5:
This idea of becoming the one-stop shop, the quick links for us have been huge. We implemented these in February, 2023, and we took a look at the data, the very limited data that we did have, but in each of those kind of four organizations, they did. Again, we’re hosting some of these systems and information, and we took a look to see what were the most utilized systems, and then those were the ones that we brought forth here as I think Jana said it, but we also don’t always need to have everything be a longstanding quick link up here. Some of those can change. They can be evergreen. We used that same strategy, and I’ll mention that in a moment, but in addition to those systems that were the top systems, we did also look at some others that again, didn’t actually live anywhere but people needed them.

Speaker 5:
How to submit a work order for our facilities, our brand center where we were hosting our logos, our agenda, our templates, links to our store for people to purchase more collateral or to get swag items for their teams and departments. So again, trying to figure out what were those most used resources that people didn’t actually know where to find them. We have 75% of our users that have clicked on at least one link since we implemented this, and our H R I S system has more than 200,000 clicks since we launched in February, 2023. So again, people were using it. They actually were wanting the information, they just didn’t know where to find it before. This is a great example of kind of utilizing everything into this centralized hub. Open enrollment. This year was the first time that we had all of our employee base on the same benefits plan.

Speaker 5:
So previously, four organizations, four separate benefits plans for separate timelines. Let me tell you about a communications challenge that was really difficult. And again, we couldn’t target people broadly as a result of this. So this year, we were actually able to create a topic. We were able to target all of our employees. We drove all of our communications there, whether they were mailers, our screensavers flyers, posters with QR codes, everything went there to help people provide them with information. The benefits guide, we did virtual benefits fairs, we had help sessions, everything. Both all of that information lived here. We were sent out four emails. Between that time, we had an average open rate of 46% and average click-through rate of 53%. And then we also had a temporary shortcut that we did enable there with nearly 700 users that clicked during that time. I’m going to try to go a little faster here so we have time for questions.

Speaker 5:
But our modern intranet, this for us is really our next phase. This is the evolution. Like I said, we’ve been an organization that’s been here for a really long time. We did not have an intranet. This is our start. This is our beginning, but we need to evolve. And truly what we’re finding out from our employee base is that they want more. They actually are coming to us and saying, I have all these resources. How do I collectively house them? How can you help me put this information out there? So a lot of our leaders are looking to us to figure out basically how to categorize and classify their information. So that’s really our next step, trying to centralize all this information together, all these tools and resources. We’ve been partnering with our internal teams right now to audit their content, to understand what do they have, what do they need, and how do we kind of take this to the next step.

Speaker 5:
So in partnership with Firstup, we’re looking at that functionality that the platform offers and how can we do a better job to really, again, target those employees by role, by location, to be able to serve up our content, to be able to serve up our systems and resources in a way that’s truly meant for each employee personally and individually. And then relaunch mobile. So again, we were not a mobile enabled organization. Covid didn’t really help us with that. People still just didn’t seem to gravitate towards it, but we were now using more apps for a lot of our other systems. So I think that’s starting to become a little bit more commonplace for our employees. So as we move forward with this next phase, we see a great opportunity to relaunch and have a more customized app that we hope, again, will really drive our employees to use it.

Speaker 5:
And that knowing that they might not all again be at their desk and able to get that information, but they still have a connection to those tools and resources as they need it. And just some key takeaways from my standpoint as we’ve gone through this journey over the last couple of years where you start may not be the final product, it certainly wasn’t in our case, we had a need when Covid hit to push out communications. That was our primary goal as a result of the platform, but that’s not our need now. So we are evolving. We are thinking about our strategy differently. We’re thinking about what do our employees need. We also need to understand your capabilities and limitations. Again, it wasn’t perfect when we launched. We knew that we did have truly some IT and HR limitations. We didn’t have great data, but again, we had a starting point and we had a collective group that wanted to work together to mobilize to make it better.

Speaker 5:
So we were able to do that and we’re slowly progressing in that direction, utilizing an employee first mindset. Again, we had a really kind of a push out information strategy to begin with, but now we’re listening. What do our employees want? What are they asking for? What are those resources and tools that they need to do their jobs? And making sure that we’re making that available for people. And then lastly, using it as an opportunity to reinforce your culture. Again, given our workforce, given the today’s world, people are all over the place. It’s a very diverse, from a geographic standpoint as well as a worker standpoint. So there is still a way to make that connection happen, to reinforce your culture, and to be able to share and make everyone feel valued and appreciated. And then I think we’ll turn

Speaker 2:
It to questions.

Speaker 6:
I’ll start.

Speaker 7:
Thank you guys so much. Can you hear me? Yeah. I really appreciate all the information and insight that you provided today. I’m curious, for the first presenters, you mentioned that you have a manager only newsletter that goes out monthly or biweekly, I think is what you said.

Speaker 2:
Both. We have a monthly one, and that’s one topic and a weekly one. That’s one topic.

Speaker 7:
Okay. So I’m curious how you decide what information gets pushed out biweekly and what information gets pushed out monthly. And also on top of that, do you have an all staff newsletter that goes

Speaker 2:
Out? We do. We have two. So we have a manager’s on Tuesdays. We drop a manager’s newsletter, and it’s called our Operations Hub. So it is really clinically, it’s clinical information. It’s right, it’s the new processes. It’s a patient experience stuff, but it is new policies. It is like everybody has to get a flu shot. And it’s the very manager specific things. Like we are just changing right now based on some feedback from our employee survey, but we’re doing no do share for our managers. It’s what we need you to know the steps. Here’s what we need you to do, basically talk to your employees, print this information out, check for understanding.

Speaker 2:
Tell ’em that if they don’t get their flu shot, they’re in a nice way, they’re off the schedule because we’re pretty strict about that. And then the share part is really literally the talking points, what we need them to say to their. So we do that. We’re doing that kind of information once a week, and we have a group of operational leaders that we get information from, and we do daily safety huddles. That’s a phone call thing. And so we have one of our team that listens every morning and gets that information on Wednesday. We do a strip down version of that same information for employees. It’s the sharing part of it, just in case their manager didn’t share with them. It’s that share part. And then on our Thursdays for all employees, we call it Essential News Weekly. And it’s like blood drives and the latest kudos and it’s,

Speaker 3:
It’s a recap of the leader messages, anything, not operations. So HR leader messages and sprinkled with some recognition and event content is on Thursdays. At the very last slide that Erin showed, there was a resiliency playbook that was a once a month communication to managers that was not necessarily timely information, but ways to build resilience with your workforce and ways to recognize your workforce. And we

Speaker 2:
Tips for having better communications with your employees. Here’s an activity to reinforce our mission, vision values.

Speaker 3:
Does that answer your question though, to kind of serve it up a little bit of how we decide? So the timely information is really an operations hub and it has to go weekly. The Essential News Weekly is the stuff that we publish in the app that people may have not seen that we kind of try and corral. Okay. I hope that, thank you. Okay.

Speaker 8:
Wickedly impressed with both of your programs. And I have a question for each of you. For community, I loved the way that you tied your outcomes to employee satisfaction data.

Speaker 2:
I could talk for half a day about this. This has been my last passion project for the year. I think

Speaker 8:
What’s beautiful about it is so often before analytics were available, outputs were the things, we sent this many emails, this many messages, or that as it’s your passion, is this something that you got direction from leadership, or did you just see this connection directly and you’re like, we have to report

Speaker 2:
This? No, we have a communications and public affairs plan. Our department is integrated with marketing and public affairs and internal communications and the website, digital stuff. So it’s all one. And we have a plan that we present that our S V P presents to the board, and they want us to report back on it every six months how we’re doing against the plan. And our goal is retention. So I pair with the recruitment marketing folks that are in our department and we do a retention and recruitment metrics plan back to them. But how do you measure retention? It’s just not like the fact that people open your messages or they liked it or they comment it. That doesn’t mean they’re staying right. That doesn’t mean you’re staying. So that was my challenge. So I could talk a lot and I would be happy to talk offline about how it’s evolving. It’s still evolving about how we tagged content, how we decided which things we were going to measure, the impact, what are the things that make somebody stay, and then what are we communicating back on? What are we communicating about that connects to those things? So that’s kind of where we started

Speaker 8:
With that. Brilliant. That’s a TED Talk

Speaker 2:
Usually. Yeah. No, it was, doesn’t

Speaker 3:
Matter.

Speaker 2:
Took me. Yeah, I took myself out of everything for a couple days to think about it, but it was hard.

Speaker 8:
Brilliant. And Tamara for you just kind of casually dropped that you guys did a whole new HR system. That and a whole, it’s

Speaker 5:
Still painful to talk about, so I’m trying to avoid the trauma.

Speaker 8:
Are you still disassociating or, yeah.

Speaker 5:
Now,

Speaker 8:
It sounded like in the order of events that it was your implementation of the communication program that surfaced the issues with having the disparate systems and then drove. Is that the cart and the horse, or how did

Speaker 5:
No, we knew we were disparate. We knew we were decentralized, and we knew we had a need for something that we couldn’t necessarily implement until truly covid happened. I think a lot of the challenges when we were actually trying to launch the program made things much more evident to people. So I had a stronger support from leadership about things we needed. As we talked about that H R I S and we started looking about different attributes and stuff we were bringing to the system. We knew, I mean, our distribution lists prior to with Outlook were a mess. I mean, I can’t even describe how we could not target or send anything to anybody. I mean, it was truly a disservice to our employees that we were not able to get information to them. So we did uncover a lot of things as we started going through this process, which again, good and bad, we were kind of dusting off everything here and showing everybody what wasn’t right.

Speaker 5:
But again, it brought everybody together. It certainly provided an opportunity for us to take a look at what do we really need to do. And again, we’re still evolving on it. Our H R I S system that did launch, I mean, we still have some data challenges. It’s not perfect. Now as we’re going through this kind of next phase with the modern internet and working with the team, we know we’re going to have to look at the attributes again and seeing being pulled in, what do we want to do now we have a chance to kind of start all over and we’ve been joking with these guys that we have a chance to, they said they’d love to blow up their intranet, and now we get to kind of start fresh and the way we want to think about things because good or bad, we didn’t really have something before. So now as we start thinking about what were we going to bring into the platform, what are those attributes that we truly want to choose what we did the first time around, we don’t have to do that again. We can think about targeting people differently now that we have this kind of integrated system and take a look at what information, how do we want to target people. So we’re going to have, I think, more opportunity to do more than we ever did before. Kudos for the work.

Speaker 9:
Hello. Thanks so much for your presentations. I’m just curious, both of you mentioned having a homepage that launches and opens on the browser. Is it the actual Firstup homepage or is it like integrated with your intranet? Just curious more about the tactical way you made that happen. I’ll

Speaker 3:
Answer it for us. So ours is our intranet, which is SharePoint 2013. The thing we’d love to blow up our intranet, hopefully next year we will blow that up, but it has lots of micro apps or amplifiers if you were a classic studio users integrated into it. So I would say about two thirds of it is for content from our Firstup platform. So that is the first thing that loads every time that a user opens a shared workstation or any desktop in our organization is our intranet. But again, two thirds of it is Firstup content. So anything that we feature in our community app is literally the top stuff you’re going to see at the very top of our intranet. I mean,

Speaker 2:
For instance, to get to the electronic medical record system, unless they have that specially bookmarked on their desktop, they will open that and then probably click on a link to get to Epic. We have

Speaker 3:
Epic for, that’s for us. But you said use Speak? Yeah,

Speaker 5:
So ours actually is Sheppard Pratt Pulse switches our Firstup platform. So that’s what people are going to log in, and that’s the default when they come into ours. Again, that could shift and change depending on what we do as we go forward with our more full internet solution. But right now that is what the first thing people log in because again, we didn’t really have anything else prior that had access to systems for people, those tools, the resources as well as the content. So that’s doing all of that now for us.

Speaker 2:
Yeah.

Speaker 10:
Hi. Thank you. Just a follow up question on the retention analysis you’ve been doing, have you started to look at specific types of content or specific topics that are better signals than others? And do you segment that way in your analysis?

Speaker 2:
I was really interested in the AI stuff about predicting who’s going to leave that talk this morning. Because I work really closely with organizational development in our hr, and so I’m always like, well, what’s our retention rate this month? Do I want to know? Right? I mean, I care because it’s $70,000 to onboard a nurse to recruit and onboard a nurse, and if they’re going out the door, that’s millions of dollars for 10,000 employees. That’s a big deal. And I always think in my head, and this is how I sell it to my colleagues, if we have 20 nurses go out the door, we’re not getting raises this year. I mean, seriously, are we not going to conferences or that’s money that could be spent on other things if we can keep people and make ’em happy. But I’m looking at, I mean, I am really looking at growth. Are they using those, are they growing, wanting to grow their career? Are they accessing our, not just our medical benefits, but those perks, unused benefits that everyone talks about? We’re

Speaker 3:
Trying persistent program wellbeing, resource

Speaker 2:
Wellbeing, our wellbeing resources, and also we’re looking at the appreciation and recognition content. And the other thing is we don’t have a culture of it in healthcare of sharing or because we are always telling ’em, don’t share anything because of hipaa. So getting them to post content or even comment, the more we can get that engagement and making them feel connected to each other is because we know in our employee survey, one of the big high marks is, or if we go talk to ’em during hospital week or we do videos, it’s always like, oh, I love my coworkers. It’s like a family here in the trenches doing hard stuff together. Think your best friend will

Speaker 3:
Keep you around. So we really try and foster that connection and help people connect, especially if the remote workers or across different campuses.

Speaker 2:
Those are the things I’m measuring. But yeah, I could go into a lot about how to measure it and how to tag all that content. It’s not really a topic, it’s really more about tagging. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
We are at time, so I want to thank everybody for the questions. I particularly want to thank the presenters for sharing their stories, and this has been our Spotlight on Healthcare. Thank you. Thanks everyone.